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December 19, 2007
36 Ideas - #1, Variant A: Who's Your Neighbor? (Social Calisthenics)
Advance Preparation
None
Estimated Time
10-20 minutes
Introduce the Exercise
Once standing, please stay standing. If you don't recognize the name of the technology or the examples, assume you are not using it. Terms will be defined later.
Let's Do It
PART 1:
1. Is anyone here using Second Life? If so, please stand up!
2. Does anyone here share presentations or educational content via Slideshare or Classroom 2.0 or similar sites?
3. Does anyone here contribute content to a social news site, such as NowPublic?
4. Is anyone here in Ning? If so, please stand up!
5. Is anyone here in another social networking site (Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or other)? If so, please stand up!
6. Is anyone here using microblogging (Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr)? If so, please stand up!
7. Does anyone here share images via a photosharing site (Flickr, Zoomr, SmugPhoto)?
8. Does anyone here share, collect or comment on content via a social media site (YouTube, iTunes, Last.fm, Justin.tv) or by podcasting?
9. Is anyone here using social bookmarking (del.icio.us, Digg, Connotea, 2collab, CiteULike, StumbleUpon, etc.)? If so, please stand up!
10. Has anyone here ever edited or added content to a wiki? If so, please stand up!
11. Does anyone here blog, even occasionally? If so, please stand up!
12. Does anyone here use a social shopping site, such as Amazon? OK, everyone standing now?
PART 2:
1. How many of you use 3 or more of these tools? Please remain standing, everyone else sit down.
2. How many of you use 6 or more of these tools? Remain standing.
3. How many of you use 9 or more of these tools? Remain standing.
[4. If there is still a crowd of folk standing, start listing individual tools until most of them drop out.]
3. When you get down to one or two folk still standing, start Part 3.
PART 3:
1. OK, everyone sitting down, take a good look at the folk standing. How many of you know them or recognize them? Please stand up.
2. Folks still sitting, do you recognize ANYONE who is standing? If so, please stand up.
3. Repeat as necessary until a significant portion of the audience is standing.
Take Home Message(s)
1. Social technologies are ubiquitous.
2. Social technologies connect people (duh!).
Connect the Tech
Most people get involved with social technologies because they already know someone else who is using whatever it is. Which people in this room were using which technologies? Does knowing that certain folk are using certain technologies make them (either the person or the technology) more intriguing to you?
Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise
None
Posted by pfa at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)
36 Ideas - #1: Who's Your Neighbor? (Social Calisthenics)
Advance Preparation
None
Estimated Time
5-10 minutes
Introduce the Exercise
Once you are standing, please remain standing until instructed otherwise.
Let's Do It
1. Look at the people on both sides of you. Do you recognize either of them? If so, please stand up!
2. Folks still sitting down, look at the folks around you in any direction. Do you recognize either of them? If so, please stand up!
3. Folks sitting down, look up and down the row in which you are sitting. Recognize anyone? If so, stand up!
4. Folks seated, now look around the quadrant of the room in which you are sitting. Recognize anyone? If so, stand up!
5. Take a good look around now, at all those standing people. Anyone look familiar? If so, stand up!
6. People standing up - is there anyone sitting down near you? If so, you now have 1-2 minutes to ask questions to find out if you know anyone in common. As soon as find someone in common, be sure to stand up! On your mark, go!
Take Home Message(s)
It's a small world, and even in a big room in a strange city, chances are you probably know someone.
Connect the Tech
Most people get involved with social technologies because they already know someone else who is using whatever it is. They spread by osmosis (or a virus? airborne?). Look at how many people in this room know someone else in this room, and imagine the potential for an idea to spread throughout this community.
Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise
This would only work in a largish group of folk that know each other moderately well. A small group that works together every day would not work, nor would a new group of people where they've mostly never met anyone else there.
Posted by pfa at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
36 Ideas: Teaching Web 2.0 Concepts
David Rothman and I are going to be copresenting as invited speakers on Web 2.0 and social technologies at the May 2008 Medical Library Association. We thought it would be a really interesting idea to include some audience participation exercises to illustrate fundamental social technology concepts and applications. We had a couple ideas of our own about this, and will be blogging about it (and tweeting and querying Facebook friends, etcetera).
A little over a week ago, I went to a local real-world social networking group - A2B3. A2B3 is a motley collection of geeks, tech wizards, corporate startups, educators, students, hobbyists, politicians, activists, and various other identities who gather once a week for lunch and to discuss interesting ideas. I tossed this idea out to them for starters, with a couple examples, and collected a fascinating collection of cool ideas. I hope to expand on some of these over the next few weeks and months as we develop our ideas for our presentation. In addition, hopefully, this might become a useful collection of teaching concepts for other folk.
What I give below is the scenario I provided to the group, and the notes I took of what they said. Not all of my notes make sense to me now, but those that do will turn into separate blog entries of how we envision they'll work. This is just a sampler to whet your appetites and fire up your imagination. Feel free to add more in comments!
SCENARIO:
You have a room full of people, around 100-200. You want this group to do a few exercises that would illustrate in real world terms the types of connections and interactions that social tech applications facilitate. How would you do this?
IDEAS:
1. Who's your neighbor? (Who do you know.)
2. What's a social network? (Ribbon game)
3. FB Beacon shoutout model (a.k.a. Twitterpation)
4. Reputation networks (verify identity)
5. Playing phone (twitter relay, twitter storm)
6. What is a seminal moment?
7. How would I tag myself? (Self-sorting exercise)
8. Sort in Space (Geographic sorting)
9. Gift introductions
10. Issues of trust
11. LinkedIn Intros
12. 43 things
13. Collaboration
14. Flickr tags (photo sorting)
15. Magazine routing (items of interest)
16. Saving articles to share, ie. digg
17. Ranking and shoutouts
18. Key person who becomes link of influence (gatekeeping)
19. Use all channels available / Common ground / Conversation
20. Proximity (connection to real life)
21. Graffiti is Facebook (used to be tagging)
22. Turf relationships
23. "PlacesDowntown" (a.k.a. Twitter)
24. Pair an open source expert with novice and get them to come up with a new open source project
25. Monkeys Mixer (marriages, divorce, pair up your friends via email)
26. Critical Mass (i.e. fax machines)
27. The Ladies that Lunch (collaborative decisionmaking - refining suggestions of lunch venues)
28. What is a Flickr Topic Pool? (sorting by image prefs)
29. Gallery Night (What is an PhotoBlog?)
30. Rumors
31. Objects of Fascination
32. Organizational Nucleus
33. 57 miles (sticker + serendipitous encounters)
34. Ann Arbor Birthdays
35. Sort by: (geography); then secondary sort by (interest / skillbase / hobbies / pets / cuisine / gender / generation / ... )
36. Game Show Host (come ooonnnnn down!)
Posted by pfa at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2007
UM in Second Life: Our First Community Brown Bag
Second Life is one of several virtual worlds or MUVEs (multi-user virtual environments). Second Life (SL) in particular has become prominent in educational circles over the past couple years, with established presences from many universities. More background information about Second Life is available from this slidecast.
The University of Michigan opened Wolverine Island for use by the UM Community this term (Fall 2007). Since then, Wolverine has continued to rapidly evolve and change, with more interesting and dynamic spaces. The first course to be taught at Wolverine was an elective for the M1 students (more on that later). The first community social event, a brown bag to discuss future needs and plans for the UM SL community, happened this past Friday. I thought it would be remiss of me to not report back on how the event went, generally, and the actual work productivity interaction features of the meeting.
ABOUT LOCATION:
We'd been asked to have a series of events for people new to Second Life where they could come to a campus location and practice their skills with more expert people available to help. With that in mind, this was a combined real world / virtual world event. The real world location was the new Crossroads computer classroom at the School of Public Health.
Regarding the location in Second Life, here are some images of both Wolverine Island and the people (avatars) who came to the Brown Bag.
FOLKS WHO CAME:
Around 20 people attended the session*. 7 came to the real world location, and almost all of those were our team of designated helpers. So where were people coming from?
- 7 = Public Health classroom
- 2 = working from home
- 2 = Med School
- 2 = own office
- 1 = Dearborn campus
- the rest = unspecified
* 17 verified, but I didn't catch all of the names, so there were more.
Not everyone identified their departments, but those that did included people from the libraries, Medical School, Department of Kinesiology, School of Information, LS&A, and Dearborn Campus.
At one point, we were talking about the potential of SL for distance education, but from this I could see some real utility for just regular meetings! Think of all those meetings you go to all around campus and the travel time you plan, and then imagine going to a meeting by popping onto your computer, with your office around you and your desk and files and cup of coffee ready to hand. Even with this meeting, at the end, about half the people leaving on time said they had real world meeting they needed to get to. This made for a bit of contrast.
MEETING PRODUCTIVITY:
Just to show that meetings in Second Life can be productive, let me share a bit of what happened. The topic of the meeting was brainstorming for what we would like to do for future brainstorming sessions. Here is an abbreviated and selected list of topics suggested in the 45 minutes of active discussion.
General:
- invited speakers
- experimental techniques or tools
- checklists or best practices for types of events
Issues:
- rules or guidelines for effective use of voice
- learning curve vs. learning cliff: does SL keep changing too much to be effective in education?
- do we need a real world pre-orientation before students enter SL?
- providing or getting tech support for SL for UM activities
- Doing field research in SL, getting started, logistics, etc
- finding funding for SL projects
Education:
- best practices in SL education
- tours to educational places + discussion/conversation
- SL for distance learning
- Herding Cats 101 (how to coordinate a class moving around SL)
- developing mentoring system for new teachers in SL
- what types of SL instruction and class activities best work with new students?
- how to best orient new students to SL
- teaching in SL, lessons learned
- managing student accounts with money
- conducting constructivist learning activities in SL
- market penetration of SL in our student populations
Skills:
- voice configuration
- safe places for newbies
- best places for education
- who and how to ask for help
- finding professional attire
- getting dressed, making outfits, making clothes 101
- building tutorials
- scripting tutorials
- how to stream audio/video for events
- things to do with textures
- building tours or HUDs
- tips for combined RL/SL events
- capturing class sessions for asynchronous viewing
- machinima
- using mouseview and taking pics in SL
- things to do with your Profile
- lag and how to prevent it
- finding/using animations
- creating custom animations
- navigation in SL, tips and tricks
- inventory management skills
FUTURE:
The group discussed a variety of ideas for future events, so stay tuned. For the short-term, please feel free to join us at more brown bags in Second Life. They are Fridays, noon Michigan time or 9-10 SLT (Second Life Time) at the campfire on Wolverine Island (unless otherwise specified).
December 14, noon
TOPIC: prioritizing future brown bag topics, what is most important to the UM Second Life community
December 21, noon
TOPIC: A tour of Wolverine Island
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Contact Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich dot edu, or IM Perplexity Peccable in Second Life.
Posted by pfa at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2007
About Bubbles (the Video) and the Meaning of Social Technologies (a.k.a. Web 2.0)
Between my professional writing and teaching load, I haven't had much time for blogging lately. That does not mean that I haven't been seeing cool productivity tools nor that I am not just busting at the gills with awesome ideas I've seen or heard and want to share. More on that soon, I hope!
Meanwhile, the buzz this week has been the new YouTube video, "Here Comes Another Bubble." Before we go right to the video, I'd like to put it in context.
Earlier in this blog I highlighted another popular video about Web 2.0, a.k.a. social technologies, "Web 2.0 -- The Machine is Using Us."
The focus in the first video is on the range of social technologies, what / why social technologies, and really a nifty introduction to the idea of social tech as a kind of ubiquitous crowdsourcing environment. Pretty nifty! This is what I really focus on myself in social tech -- the ideas that are most important are (a) people FIRST; (b) everyone has something to contribute; (c) the power of the many; (d) the personal and collective utility of friendship and collaboration. Perhaps the ultimate democratic environment thus far, with political and viral meme implications that are beyond the scope of this blog.
Back to the topic. The "Here Comes Another Bubble" video focuses on a narrower view of social tech, primarily the economic implications. Let's take a look at it.
Realistically, all grown ups who have had to work for a while have figured out that either you go off and live a lifestyle based on hunter / gatherer / subsistence farming, live homeless, or you have to figure out a way to make a living. It is entirely possible to have a great idea to benefit the welfare of mankind and have it never see the light of day because of sociopolitical or economic factors. So whatever the idea is, other people have to find value in it.
What people like changes. Hey, what did you expect? As individuals and communities, we learn, get bored, move along, become fascinated with something new, and generally keep spiraling (hopefully) upward. The short message of the video is that if you are looking for a way to make money, you might expect that the whole social technologies business is probably leveling off. This will impact on the trends of development.
There are so many incredible tools and widgets and gadgets that no one person can keep track of the whole picture. Once it gets hard to find the cool tool you want, it is kind of like household clutter. Anyone here ever bought a second copy of something you already had because you couldn't find the first one? (/me raises hand) At that point, we've crested.
The most successful web 2.0 entities are those that have aggregated a suite of tools - one stop shops. The geek will go out hunting for the best tool for the task. Johnny B. Good man-on-the-street will use the first tool they find that accomplishes the task fairly easily. People like the authors of this blog try to bridge that gap. I expect the next step to be more consolidation and refinement, rather than a lot of totally new concepts.
Lucky for me, I'm not in it for the money. As an educator, though, I do want to be aware of the trends and what is coming next. Humanity is so social I don't see the social part of technology getting less. I can see it becoming such an assumed default that we don't talk about it much. No more so than, we explain relationship dynamics to two-year-olds. Of course people like technologies that facilitate connections with other people. Duh.
Posted by pfa at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)